Well, it has been quite some time since my last post.  I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet, I’ve just been busy with school, work, family, golf, trading and working out.

This market has been really, really tough.  There have been times that my account has been a rocket ship, moving up with reckless abandon and then of course other times getting just flat out crushed.  I’ve really had to make some tweaks to how I trade in order to manage this market.

I’ve moved away from options, and exclusively to futures. I’m trading mainly on tick charts, very, very short term in and out scalps.  I have about 5 markets that I’m watching and I am trading one setup.  If I don’t find the setup when I scan the markets, I don’t trade them.  It takes mes about 30 seconds to scan the markets, and then I’m back to whatever I was doing before.

If I find my setup, I put in the limit order (or stop sell/buy) with an OCO bracket and go back to what I was doing.  My profitability has gone way up. The setups are clean, and trading these way keeps me out of the markets when they are not trending.  I had been trying to scalp channels, and choppy markets.  It was profitable, but also very costly when I was wrong.

Simple setups, difficult markets = profits.

The best part about these setups is that I can do the market scan so quickly that I am able to scan often with basically zero interuption to the rest of my day.